Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization: The Jurisdiction of Indifferent Everydayness
Everyday Practices and Practical Formalization: The Jurisdiction of Indifferent Everydayness

Summary/Abstract: This paper takes its starting point from the use of ‘Alltag’ and ‘Alltäglichkeit’ in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. Its main interest however is focused on a dimension of everyday life – namely, ‘indifferent everydayness’ – mentioned only incidentally in Being and Time, and on the possibilities it opens for overturning the very discussion on everyday life in contemporary sociology. With a view to such a perspective I repeatedly bind Heidegger’s viewpoint with the way ethnomethodology treats everyday life, coming up as a matter of fact against the totality of indifferent everydayness. Thus the ‘misreading’ to which ethnomethodology is subjected in the paper opens up a radical vision of everydayness behind ethnomethodological studies and this, on the other hand, throws a new light both on indifferent everydayness and on the sociological potential of the category of everyday life in general. Such a vision breaks with the ordinary comprehension of everyday life through the prism of institutional overcodifications and draws attention to the developing everyday practices in the whirlwind of which the elementary codifications of regularity are produced and stabilized. From such a perspective, special emphasis is placed on the relations between everyday practices and practical formalizations. Heidegger and the ethnomethodologists, though in a different way and in a different style, display a sensitivity to such a dynamic understanding of everyday life. This understanding, on its part, reveals considerable resources for interpreting power legitimation as an element of the immediate interactive practices of exercising power.

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